Real Life Rock Top 10: November 1, 2023

1-4. Rolling Stones, Hackney Diamonds (Rolling Stones), Will Hodgkinson, “The Rolling Stones: Hackney Diamonds review—a joy from beginning to end,” London Times (October 9), Grayson Haver Currin, “Hackney Diamonds, The Rolling Stones,” Pitchfork (October 20), and William Burleson, “What would happen if the Rolling Stones held a concert and nobody came?” Hennepin History Magazine (2022).  Mick Jagger recently endorsed the idea of the possibility of a “‘posthumous tour’ with AI avatars depicting himself and his fellow bandmates on stage,” as the Daily Mail characterized a Wall Street Journal interview. There’s no need to wait. If Hackney Diamonds, blastooned everywhere as the band’s first album of original songs in more years than it took to sign Ron Wood in 1975 to replace Mick Taylor, who replaced Brian Jones, who formed the band in 1962, isn’t posthumous, it’s AI all the way.  Though with the exception of Grayson Haver Currin’s demolition job, which left nothing standing, almost everyone else has fallen into line, most fulsomely Will Hodgkinson, who in a kind of Tory manifesto celebrated the apparent fact that the Rolling Stones don’t want to change the world, they just want to entertain. (“In the sixties we believed in a myth—that music had the power to change people’s lives,” Stanley Booth wrote in 2011 in a new edition of his The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones, first published in 1985. “Today we believe in a myth—that music is just entertainment.”).